Montesquieu; “La liberté politique, dans un citoyen, est cette tranquillité d'esprit qui provient de l'opinion que chacun a de sa sûreté; et, pour qu'on ait cette liberté, il faut que le gouvernement soit tel qu'un citoyen ne puisse pas craindre un autre citoyen."*

Montesquieu assumed that the English Constitution, as he observed its working, would endure until "the legislature became more corrupt than the executive." In this of course he was wrong. The Reform Bill of 1832 put an end to the aristocratic régime which had prevailed during the eighteenth century, and placed the sovereign power beyond all question in a House of Commons elected by a genuinely popular franchise.

When Bagehot came to make his observations on the working of the English Constitution, the old aristocratic party system had adapted itself to the new democratic conditions of things for about a generation; and he himself allows, in the Preface to the second edition of his book on the English Constitution, that his reflections are derived from watching the working of Parliamentary government mainly during the Ministry of Lord Palmerston, and before the introduction of the Reform Bill of 1867. That is to say, his view of the Constitution covered a state of things in which the newly enfranchised electors were still unconscious of their power, while the ruling classes enjoyed all the advantages derived from a knowledge of the arts of Party government as they had been practised since the Revolution of 1688. From that point of observation he came to the following conclusions: that the governing power in the Constitution was centred in the House of Commons; that the instrument of government by the House of Commons was the Cabinet; and that the working of the Cabinet system was successful because the democratic electors to the House of Commons were as yet content to accept the guidance of aristocratic leaders. To use his own picturesque, though unscientific phraseology, England was still a "deferential" nation. From beginning to end of his little treatise on the Constitution, there is scarcely a word said about the connection between Cabinet Government and party organisation, which forms the basis of the reasoning of his follower and disciple, Mr. Lowell.

As Bagehot's view of the working of the Constitution is taken *Esprit des Lois, Libre xi. chap. vi.

from the beginning of the Parliamentary régime introduced by the Reform Bill of 1832, so Mr. Lowell's is determined by the complete development of that democratic movement.

An attempt [he says] to study it [the English Government] at any salient epoch cannot be valueless; and the present is a salient epoch, for the nation has now enjoyed something very near to manhood suffrage in the boroughs for forty years, and throughout the country more than twenty years, a period long enough for democracy to produce its primary if not its ultimate effects.*

And how extraordinary is the difference between his point of view and Bagehot's! Where the attention of the latter is fixed almost entirely on the temper of the individuals who compose the House of Commons and the electorate, and while his reflections are those of a man of the world calculating the motives of other men acting in a state of complete freedom, the American philosopher is concerned not less exclusively with the study of political machinery, and he makes scarcely any attempt to estimate the moral effects of this machinery on the society which employs it as an instrument not only of selfgovernment, but also of Empire. It is enough for Mr. Lowell to note the effects of the extension of the suffrage on the system of Party government, as revealed either in the working of the various Departments of the Executive, or in the course of legislation in the House of Commons, or in the character of the "wire-pulling" arts required for the manipulation of the electorate. His eyes are for ever bent on the closure and the caucus, machinery of which Bagehot never dreamed when he wrote his account of the working of the English Constitution.

I venture to think that some of Mr. Lowell's reasoning on the nature of the English Constitution is superficial. Wishing to prove that the Party system is really inherent in the nature of the Constitution, he argues as follows:

In England the party system is no more in accord with the strictly legal institutions, with King, Lords, and Commons, than it is elsewhere; but it is in absolute harmony with those conventions, which, although quite unknown to the law, make up the actual working constitution of the State. It is in harmony with them because they were created by the warfare of parties, were evolved out of party life. Government by a responsible ministry was not the inevitable consequence of the long struggle between the House of Commons and the

The English Government, vol. i. p. 5.

Crown. Some other means might very well have been devised for taking the executive power out of the personal control of the King. It was rather the result of the condition of the House itself; for it is inconceivable that this form of Government should have appeared if Parliament had not been divided into Whigs and Tories.*

No doubt. But how did Parliament come to be divided into Whigs and Tories? Surely, by the long antecedent struggle between the House of Commons and the Crown. There is nothing "absolute" about those "conventions" of Party government of which Mr. Lowell speaks. Party government under Walpole was, in some respects, different from what it was under the younger Pitt, and of course very different from what it was under Lord Palmerston. As it was evolved from the Constitution by political circumstances acting upon the legal elements of King, Lords, and Commons, so, we are entitled to reason, it might, by the operation of other circumstances, disappear from the Constitution, or, at least, be so greatly restricted in its range, as to be no longer, what Mr. Lowell evidently considers it, co-extensive with the Constitution. The interesting point for consideration is whether these circumstances are making their appearance. Mr. Lowell himself is witness that they are. He says: "If the existence of a responsible ministry normally involves government by Party it also requires, as a condition of success, that there should be only two Parties."† But, as everybody can see, there are at present four organised parties in the House of Commons, the two historic Parties, the Labour Party, and the Irish Nationalists. Unless therefore a governing majority can be alternately formed out of the two historic Parties sufficiently strong to be able to ignore the action of any Party but that of the regular Opposition in the conduct of Parliamentary business, it is evident, looking merely to mechanism, that all the machinery of the Constitution described by Mr. Lowell is likely to collapse.

The same result might be reached by another road, namely, by the conversion of Party government, which, in its origin, was primarily an aristocratic instrument for the attainment of Constitutional power, into a democratic instrument of social corruption. Bagehot understood very well that this might be one of the consequences of a wide extension of the suffrage. He wrote + Ibid. p. 444.

• The English Government, vol. i. p. 442.

his account of the Constitution in the period following the first Reform Bill, while the newly enfranchised electorate were still unconscious of the power that had been placed in their hands, and he regarded the Cabinet, when actually at work, as a veiled mode of aristocratic government. But when the Reform Bill of 1867 had been in operation for a few years, he noted fresh tendencies in the machinery of the Constitution, and commented on them in the following striking passage of the Preface to his second edition:

A statesman ought to show his own nature, and talk in a palpable way what is to him important truth. And so he will both guide and benefit the nation. But if, especially at a time when great ignorance has an unusual power in public affairs, he chooses to accept and reiterate the decisions of that ignorance, he is only the hireling of the nation, and does little save hurt it.

I shall be told that this is very obvious, and that everybody knows that two and two make four, and that there is no use in inculcating it. But I answer that the lesson is not observed in fact; people do not do their political sums so. Of all our political dangers, the greatest, I conceive, is that they will neglect the lesson. Iu plain English, what I fear is that both our political parties will bid for the support of the working man; that both of them will promise to do as he likes if he will only tell them what it is; that, as he now holds the casting vote in our affairs, both parties will beg and pray him to give that vote to them. I can conceive of nothing more corrupting or worse for a set of poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly offer to defer to their decision, and compete for the office of executing it. Vox populi will be Vox diaboli if it is worked in that manner.*

Mr. Lowell has had the opportunity, which Bagehot had not, of seeing that this is the manner in which the Party system is actually worked. His treatise shows that, with every extension of the suffrage, the bonds of Party discipline become more rigid, and that this, and not any philosophical providence, is the reason of the omnipotence of the Cabinet in the conduct of our affairs. If the Cabinet is, superficially, the Committee of the majority of the House of Commons, the House of Commons itself (in spite of what Mr. Lowell argues to the contrary) is, or tends to become, the Committee of the caucus. In order to secure Party supremacy, as reflected in a majority of the House of Commons, it is necessary for the Party leaders to depend upon those who work the machinery of the constituencies, and whose main business it is to invent such an appearance of principle in their cause as will • The English Constitution (1904), pp. xxii.-xxiii.

be likely to catch the votes of a numerical majority of the electors. Hence, so far from statesmen talking (or at least acting upon) what is to them "important truth," we know quite well that Mr. Asquith, the head of the Cabinet, was obliged three years ago to surrender what he held to be the principles of justice in obedience to the dictates of the Trade Unions. It is matter of common notoriety that he is unable to carry out the measures that he conceives to be necessary for the defence of the country, in consequence of the opposition of a section of his Cabinet which always keeps its eye fixed on the supposed inclinations of the electoral majority; while at the present moment he is arguing, in the pettifogging style of a lawyer who holds a party brief, on behalf of a revolutionary scheme of taxation, the incidence of which his own recently recorded words show that he thinks to be unjust. Mr. Lowell, who looks on these things from outside, can observe them, on the "suave mari magno principle, with equanimity; but we Englishmen, who actually live under the Constitution which he is only concerned to describe, may perhaps be pardoned if our feelings towards it are less philosophical.

Again, in the opinion of Mr. Lowell, the lines that divide the two governing parties must not be confused with the lines of the Constitution itself. "As Professor Dicey has put it," he says,

66

parties must be divided upon real differences, which are important, but not fundamental.”* Can that be said of the present working of the English Party system? On the contrary, at the last General Election the appeal to the voters was not made upon any real difference of principle, but upon phrases calculated to stir up Party prejudice and passion in ignorant minds. It was said that the "Tories" were in favour of "slavery"; that the "Liberals" were opposed to the "extravagance" to which their opponents were naturally inclined; and though there was doubtless a difference of policy involved in the opposing views held about Free Trade and Fiscal Reform, this question was presented to the electors as if the one Party were the defenders of the "big loaf" against the other which was doing its best or worst to bring back the "little." Clap-trap like this proved sufficient to procure the return of the existing majority

*The English Government, vol. i. p. 438.